


Land and sea and foam

by deepandlovelydark



Series: That Deep Romantic Chasm, or Journey to the Center of the Neath [4]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, MacGyver (TV 1985), Sunless Sea
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Hurt/Comfort, Prisoner's Honey, Whump, general Neathy weirdness, the sigil for an immobile cynosure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 12:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12557588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: The Innocent Spy has an appointment to keep in London, now his niece is in the Neath. He doesn't intend to be late.Intentions, of course, don't always go for much.





	Land and sea and foam

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright items: Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com. This is an unofficial fan work. MacGyver is copyright either Paramount or Lee David Zlotoff, depending. Certainly not mine.

Reason no. twenty-six why the _Trenchant_ isn't as nice as his old ship: there aren't any cushions aboard. The Innocent Spy rather wishes he'd thought to tuck one in his crate. A pile of port reports doesn't make for a very satisfactory pillow substitute. 

But the _Clipper_ wasn't bound for London and the _Trenchant_ is, and he's desperate to find Becky and Jack now he knows they're here. It'd been one thing resigning himself to permanent Neath exile, forcing himself to bury his Surface life under the protection of deep-cover DXS training- but if his niece and his best friend have somehow made it down here, what more could he possibly ask for? Except for reruns of some favourite Westerns. And the company of a certain dark-eyed Phoenix agent- but that'd just be greedy. One miracle is still one more than he was looking for.

Meanwhile, he's stuck on a ship that smells overwhelmingly of coffee and bat-droppings, whose crew try to slaughter every zee-monster they see (understandable, given the short rations). It's bloody cold. The Captain fancies himself a gentlemanly miser and begrudges every scrap of fuel, so keeps the storage lockers sealed and makes sure to be on hand when it's measured out, every morning. Only the boiler room's at all warm- far too hot, in fact- but zailors still have knock-down fights every few days about who gets to enjoy stoking duty in there. Reason no. twenty-seven... 

The Polythreme poncho keeps to his crate, partly because he's asked it to make sure nobody breaks in, and partly because both of them are more than a little anxious what this crew would do if confronted with living clothing. His old Surface jacket's battered and slightly illegal, but he needs it now for warmth as much as comfort, and it doesn’t stick out too much in the perpetually underlit engine room. Hard not to fret about this inefficient Chief Engineer: the man's not only sloppy, but inordinately touchy about suggestions or offers of help. No wonder he and the Captain get on so well. 

At least his dreams go better. Becky wanders through them, bringing summertime in her wake. 

"I can't believe I let the Nadir take you from me," he tells her, planting a walking stick into rich forest loam. They're always outside in these, scintillating white beaches or wildflower-filled meadows, nothing like the Underzee. Today it's woodland, hiking through LA’s green belt. 

"Not your fault," his niece says reassuringly. "You couldn't help it."

"Stop trying to absolve me. The real Becky might have something to say about my forgetting all about her, just because I hadn't done my homework and ended up in amnesia-world."

"Why shouldn't I be the real Becky, huh? You know what I always said. That we have a special sort of connection, that if you ever died I'd know right away."

"Yeah. And I always said I hoped it wouldn't be put to the test any time soon, didn't I?"

"Face it, Unc, you need some looking after right now," Becky says, raising her voice a little as they approach a sun-dappled waterfall. "I don't want to lose you, not when we're this close."

"Aw, you worry too much. I'll be fine."

"We're making progress. At least you called me 'you' that time."

**************

He picks up a bad habit of compulsive whistling, outrageously anachronistic tunes that he oughtn't even to breathe, in case they somehow cause a timeline fracture- but it eases his nerves, and half the time he doesn't even notice he's doing it. _Talkin' 'bout a Revolution_ when the Captain's around. _California Dreamin'_ , way too often. _Wouldn't It Be Nice_ , when he's discussing engineering with the other understokers on the sly. That Manticore is going to explode one of these days, if the Chief Engineer keeps overloading the power like that. 

"I'm worried about the rest of them," he tells Becky, as they paddle feather-light coracles around a pond. "Most zailors have this awfully superstitious idea that they can't leave a ship until either it founders or they do. Probably Mr Fires’ idea."

"You don't think that-aggghh!" A duck's taken flight straight into her face- Becky flails and overturns into the water. 

Instinctively he abandons his own craft, tries to dive under the water to where Becky'll be in about ten seconds. Doesn't work: he can't get below the surface properly. 

Becky's laughing at him. "Even if I'd somehow forgotten how to swim, did you really think I'd manage to sink while wearing a life preserver?"

"...safety first," he says weakly.

The duck returns, and flutters down between them. 

"Of course, if you're only a dream duck..." Becky says, ruffling its feathers. "This is fun, I'd never be able to do this with a real wild creature."

"Found something more interesting than me to look after, have you?"

"Don't say that," Becky says, her small face suddenly very serious. 

**************

They stop off at the Salt Lions. Once a set of matching statues huge as anything left in Egypt, then a bustling quarry, now a desolate stretch of rock with its secrets crying to the winds. The Spy can't puzzle out why they've docked here. 

Then the Captain invites him to a dinner. Butters him up at first with would-be impressive generalities, about a piece of equipment so sophisticated the Chief Engineer has no idea how to install it. HIs attempts at flattery are just as revolting as his usual manners. The Spy listens politely and concentrates on finishing a much-needed bound-shark steak. He has a feeling the evening might end a trifle abruptly. 

Eventually, the Captain slips and mentions what the tech is. A Milebreaker. Khanate warship technology, which will usefully decrease the ship's coal consumption. 

"No, sir. Can't do it."

"You can engineer, can't you?" the Captain says. "You haven't, say, suffered a traumatic blow to the head in the last day or so?"

"No, sir," the Spy says, forcing down a sarcastic response. There's the crew at stake here, people's lives. "But I won't install a thing like that for you. I've read too many reports about how...evil it is, I suppose. What it does to hearts. Verified accounts that literally just being in the same room will give zailors nightmares."

"So, fancy yourself a troublemaker? Mutiny, eh?"

"If you want to call it that. I'd say it's just doing what's right."

"You know, the Sickly Scotsman's suggested an interesting cure for mutiny. Abandonment on a lonely island. Like the one we're at, right now."

Enough. "Then I suppose I'd best start packing, hadn't I?"

**************

Turns out, the Salt Lions are quite a bit worse than the traditional storybook desert island. Nothing here but whispering rocks, and remnants of the old quarry encampment. Which, unsurprisingly, is mostly made from rocks. 

It takes him all of a week to construct a functional boat out of fragments, another before he's managed to rig up a halfway-functional engine. Thank goodness, he does have a set of charts showing the way back to London; the Herald had sketched them out before he'd left. 

Pity he had. Maybe it would have taken longer to get home, but the _Clipper_ would have made it eventually, and he’s not sure he will alone, with next to no supplies and going by dead reckoning. One hopeful point: there’ll be water enough to drink, from a capture on the steam engine. Straight salt water isn’t good for the workings, but the voyage shouldn't take long enough that to matter- and it'll certainly last longer than he will.

All the zee-stories have him expecting loads of monsters as soon he sets off, but none give chase. Maybe it's the lack of light: he hadn't time to build a lamp, daren’t burn the few candles he’s salvaged for emergencies. Except for the faint false-star movements above, all is dark. Not good. Especially when the boredom sets in. No one to talk to, nothing to fix, no chance to read- nothing to do but sleep, and that leads to a lot of nightmares. 

Unrealistic ones, mostly, featuring a variety of stupid, overcomplicated death scenes for him with Becky as a curiously silent onlooker. At least they pass the time, get his heart pumping a bit. Aside from that, he's finding himself increasingly groggy. 

Seven or eight days in, the supplies run out. Chewing on a last salty bit of driftweed, he settles back and considers the idea that he might actually die for real this time- they say that's how it happens, at zee. So much for London and Becky and Jack. He’s almost too tired to care. 

Time to sleep again...this time, it isn’t a nightmare. It's a picnic. 

Blood and saffron? No. Ripe Surface strawberries, with plenty of fresh double cream to dip them in. Crunchy yellow crackers. A slab of sweating Red Leicester, lusciously thick. 

"Too bad this isn't real," he says, admiring the display. 

"It might be," Becky says, as she spreads a biscuit with thick, delicious-looking honey and offers it to him. 

Golden honey. Prisoner's honey. 

"No! No, my Becky wouldn't do that! You're just another nightmare- a bad hallucination-"

"I'm not, Unc. It's me."

"No. My niece would never," the Spy says, trembling. He's starting to feel faint. Reality breaking through the dream-illusion?

"Never be so desperate to find you, that she'd take a Neath drug?" Becky says softly. "Unc, the day we hit London I had nightmares for three days straight. Picking up on something that was happening- going to happen- I've been trying like anything to find you. Jack's hired out a ship, but I don't think he's going to get to you in time."

"I would much rather die than have to wake up in a reality where you turned yourself into a drug addict!" 

"And I'd much rather you not die, period!" Becky shouts, before calming down. "Besides, I'm almost sure that prisoner's honey isn't addictive in small quantities. Jack said his supplier was pretty confident about that, you'd have to take it heavily over an extended period of time."

"You've got a supplier. Oh my god, no."

"Listen to me," Becky pleads. "I think I've figured a way to do this- if you take the honey while you're dreaming, I can use it to pull you back home- but you've got to trust me! Please!"

Maybe it's her words, maybe it's his survival instinct kicking in. No such thing as a good death, but slow starvation definitely isn't one of the better ones. 

"All right. If you are my niece, tell me what my name is."

She looks utterly baffled. "It's MacGyver. And I do know your first name, but you hate it so I'd never use it anyway. Is this a trick question?"

"No," Mac says, taking the biscuit and scoffing it in one gulp. 

**************

He wakes up in London: the horde of screaming Fisher-Kings charging across the roof confirm that much. There's a full pot of cooling mushroom tea on the table, though he makes himself stop at two cups. 

Becky's curled up on the sofa besides him, a trace of honey at the corner of her mouth. He wipes it off with a napkin. 

"You did it," he tells her. "You got me out, you saved my life."

"I did?" Becky says sleepily. "Oh good. Remind me to tell you about how much fun the triangulation was, when I'm-" She yawns. "When I'm more awake."

"Good thing it runs in the family, saving people," MacGyver says softly. "Guess I taught you more than I realised, huh?"

"Mmm-hmm," Becky says, and goes to sleep again. 

Well, this is going to be frustrating. He has no end of questions to ask her - how she made it down here, what the heck Jack had to do with it, whether there's some sort of plan, what's going on back at the Phoenix Foundation, how her last year has been…

Oh well, he's pretty lucky to still be here and annoyed at all. And he's got his name back. And his niece. 

They're going to have such a lot of catching up to do...

**Author's Note:**

> As a result of the weird shenanigans inherent in the theft of four cities, a butterfly effect caused some curious climate changes near an experimental garden city in Southern California. 
> 
> And that, boys and girls and persons of indeterminate gender, is why Los Angeles looks like Vancouver. 
> 
> (The lengths I will go to, in order to explain MacGyver continuity...)


End file.
